I recently interviewed Sophie Wade for my #TimTalk series and she said something interesting, which was

"I used to be in the business of "the future of work" but now we are in the future of work".

A friend of mine went for a job interview in January of this year, he got through to the final round of interviews with the senior VP.  This VP said to him "we like all our staff to come into the office".  "Really?" said my friend.  The office being a 400 mile round trip.  My friend said "why can I not work from home?"  The VP said they did not like that, so the two of them went their separate ways.

Now look where we are.

Covid19 has changed the way we do business.

There are no face-to-face meetings, we now need to find new skills in the way we run Zoom / Teams calls with clients.

Who Will be The Winners?

The companies that win from this will be those that invest in their staff.  They will invest in their staff to teach them the modern ways to sell and market.

Even before Covid_19 we were pissed off from the contact interruptions and broadcast from the advertising, cold calling and emails.

We asked somebody recently "Do you ever sell anything from advertising, cold calling and email?"

They said "No silly, advertising, cold calling and email is about creating a conversation".

So why wouldn't you want to create conversations where your prospects and clients are on social?

Where you don't have to piss them off with interruptions but they give you permission to have those conversations?  This is why so many companies, just cannot get their message across. And the answer isn't more ads, more cold calls, most emails and more posts on social, hoping that something will happen and something will save you.

The Social Organisation

Better still how about if we could have a "programme to explore social media as a place for closing distance between our clients, our employees and our future recruits."

Sounds futuristic?  Well one company is already doing this.

This isn't just about empowering Sales and Marketing with social.  It's about empowering the whole of the organisation; Customer Service, Human Resources, Finance, Procurement, etc etc.

Stripping out cost and inefficiency and replacing that true digital (social) transformation.

But don't take my word for it, take Catherine's

This is your Leadership Moment.

While other analogue managers are going to stick with what they did in their 30s.  "It was good for me then, so it can be good for me now".  We so often hear.

Covid19 has accelerated the need to move to digital and social.

You know as well as I do that you and your team need to be fitter and stronger and have embraced digital and social by the time we get out of this crisis.

Social Selling Business Case

So what about the business case?

We expect each of the people we train in social selling to be able to make (if they do what we say) at least one additional meeting per week.  Let’s assume that 4 of those meetings turn into proposals and you close 1 of those proposals.  That means you are closing one additional deal per quarter.  If your average deal size is $100,000, then each sales person is closing an additional $400,000 per year.  As sales team of 10 will create $4 million additional revenue per annum.  This isn’t a one off, this is every year. Forever!

The Low Risk Approach

Here at DLA Ignite, we are not pivoting, we have been transforming companies to use social and digital for four years.  We have the track record, we also know what when we run our social selling programs the results are repeatable and predictable.  In fact, we have done this so many times that we are a low risk option.

If you want to get out of this mess, maybe it’s time to talk to us. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothyhughessocialselling/